Twin Cities remain Top-10 metro for generating patents

Patents are just one measure of innovation, but in an area of inquiry that's as mysterious as it is consequential, we'll take what we can get.

Minnesota continues to generate a lot of patents, specifically in the Twin Cities and Rochester, according to data put together by the Brookings Institute.

The Twin Cities has the ninth-highest concentration of patents issued of any metropolitan area in America, an average of 3,068 per year between 2007 and 2011. The top patent-creating companies in the Twin Cities are 3M, Cardiac Pacemakers, Medtronic, Honeywell, Seagate and Boston Scientific.

And Rochester, thanks mostly to IBM, has the third-highest patents issued per capita in the country, behind only San Jose (read: Silicon Valley) and Burlington, Vermont, which also has a big IBM operation.

Hat tip to Ron Wirtz of the Federal Reserve, whose blog post on the topic tipped me off to the Brookings data.